For weeks, London was hot. Not the delicious just-enough-sun of a traditional summer’s day, but the kind of heat that leaves you slow and useless. There were days during this summer when, on my regular Tube commute, the Victoria line might as well have been a sauna. As temperatures climbed near to 40°C, even some Telegraph columnists were admitting that, yes, there seems to be a climate crisis. The dangerous combination of extreme heat and a lack of rain could spark a “firewave”, experts warned (indeed, a wildfire the size of 120 football pitches broke out on the mountainside above Blaenavon in South Wales). The mood music was layered with geopolitical tension and rising existential dread that AI will kill us all.
Ours, then, is a world that is often actually—as well as metaphorically—ablaze. Natasha Walter’s latest book, Feminism for a World on Fire, promises new thinking on how to achieve gender equality in just these circumstances.
On paper, the 59-year-old is exactly the right person to diagnose the weaknesses of contemporary feminism. The former Vogue journalist turned human rights activist has already written two books on women’s rights—The New Feminism (1998) and Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (2008)—and, in 2006, founded the charity Women for Refugee Women and saw up close how British society treats the most vulnerable women. Why, then, did I finish this book feeling that it underdelivered on its promise?
It opens with a mea culpa. Walter recounts a talk she gave at a girls’ comprehensive school about 10 years ago, where her main message to the students was to “not be swayed by others’ expectations” and to be “confident in their own ambitions”. She realised later that, in a world beset by misogyny, inequality and ecological crisis, this message may not have been all that helpful: “I did my part, then, in contributing to a culture around feminism in the early twenty-first century that focused on the aspirations of young women.”
This is one of the central theses of Walter’s book: that feminism lost its way under the influence of consumer capitalism, the mirage of endless economic growth, and the temptations of individual success. “While feminists once spoke of taking down the hierarchies that raised some people above others”, now it’s all about women clambering up “a kind of ladder”. This, she puts it, with a satisfying turn of phrase, “is the language of Barbie”. Walter saw something similar in her work with refugees, many of whom were brutalised and raped in the wars they had fled. Even in such circumstances, women were being “exhorted to rely on their own resilience”.
Individual “resilience” is certainly not enough as the planet burns, argues Walter, which brings us to the other major theme of her book: that the feminist crisis is inseparable from the climate crisis.
Over the three-and-a-bit parts that follow, in sections titled with meteorological metaphors, Walter asks how feminists gathered momentum in the first two decades of the 2000s; how the movement lost energy and splintered (“Heavy weather”); how things are darkening for women’s rights (“Approaching storms”); and ways in which feminism might reinvigorate itself and adapt (“Tomorrow’s forecast”).
She begins by offering a recent, and refreshingly global, feminist history. In 2003, in Liberia, women protesters were essential to pushing then-president Charles Taylor into peace talks that ended more than a decade of civil war. In 2011, two Liberian women, the peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, by now the country’s president, shared the Nobel peace prize with the Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman. That same year, during the Arab Spring, Saudi women risked arrest to win the right to drive. In 2012, the gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi sparked mass protests.
And there was more: women protested across Latin America against femicide; in Poland and South Korea for abortion rights; globally against sexual harassment and rape under the banner of Me Too. In January 2017, Women’s Marches took place in response to the electoral victory of a new United States president who had bragged of sexually assaulting women. In 2014, Walter reminds us, 14 countries were led by women, a record. Feminism seemed so triumphant, so absorbed into mainstream politics and culture, that in 2017 Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was—you guessed it—“feminism”.
Change seemed possible, reflects Walter, but then something went wrong, as feminism transformed from a collective movement into something individualistic, even Thatcherite. The joy and hope of all that activism turned to inertia during Trump’s first term. At the same time, feminism was coopted by marketing departments and a ravenous fashion industry. “Instead of feminism remaking fashion,” notes Walter, “fashion has eaten feminism, grown fat on it, and now regurgitates it shamelessly.”
This was helped along by social media, which turned us all into individuals competing for attention, further splintering feminism as a movement. And while feminism became more mainstream, the focus remained on women improving their own lot. “Some feminist ideas are more palatable than others,” Walter writes, “and the message that the individual woman can do anything she wants if she only has the necessary courage is so easily digested that it is hardly surprising if it is served up over and over again.” The book contains examples of vapid-sounding women’s empowerment campaigns and programmes: Ban Bossy; Lean In Girls; Inspiring Girls; Step Up; the Barbie Dream Gap Project.
Walter’s politics are progressive. She points out that western liberal feminism—widely criticised for achieving progress for white, relatively privileged women above all others—emerged from a long period of economic growth. But, she argues, the political obsession with growth has been bad for women and has not yielded equality. She covers relatively familiar ground, to anyone who has been paying attention, about how the belittling of care work harms women, who tend to do more of it, paid and unpaid. (And, when they are paid, it tends to be for less money than more highly prized “male” jobs, such as plumbing.)
Walter is critical, too, of right-wing women politicians, or “elite” women more generally, whose feminism amounts to “bringing women into those elites”. This focus on aspiration, she writes, is happening as social mobility itself “is more elusive than ever”. She cites the Financial Times’s Edward Luce: people are “now likelier to stay trapped in the same income group… In place of churning, we have stasis. To a large extent, your life chances have been set by the time you are five.”
No proposition of a feminism for today, certainly not by a British writer, can sidestep the nasty splits over trans rights
In the UK, we are still astonishingly coy about class, the benefits of a private education or the ability of parents to pay for tutoring. The historian Sheila Rowbotham, a second-wave feminist who catalogued the experiences of working-class women in the 1960s, commented in 2008 that it had become harder to write about women and class. “It’s like speaking into an empty space,” Walter quotes her as saying. The point here, as elsewhere in the book, is that in a world where systems are fundamentally unequal, it seems at the very least disingenuous to tell women to simply pull their socks up and, by virtue of their own success, elevate women as a class alongside them.
This trickledown feminism has not improved matters for women and, in Walter’s account, things are only getting worse. Having taken us through the “Heavy weather”, she lays out the “Approaching storms”. Once again, for anyone who has been paying attention, much of the terrain is familiar. There is a chapter on the climate crisis and its disproportionate effects on women; on the strengthening of misogynistic regimes in places such as Afghanistan, Iran, Argentina and the US; on the horrible ubiquity of women-hatred on platforms founded by sexist tech bros, and how this reinforces patriarchal illiberalism and violence in real life. But familiarity with these issues does not lessen the shock on reading about them. Walter cites some truly horrifying statistics and examples.
It is in her treatment of division among feminists that the book breaks fresher ground. No proposition of a feminism for today, certainly not by a British writer, can sidestep the nasty splits among feminists over trans rights. At the start of the book, Walter invites all readers, whatever their position on these issues, to read it with their notion of “woman” in mind. Here, she attempts nuance for the sake of a stronger movement for change. She acknowledges the real fears and beliefs of all concerned, and attempts, albeit gently, a call to arms. The internet has pitted us against each other—and not necessarily organically—she reminds us.
Walter manages to articulate what it’s like to live in a time when violent degradation of people like you is an open secret. She writes that “there is a strange inertia and sense of fatalism about digital harms for women”. And then she describes how “the horror women feel” about the orgy of sexual violence against them online “is tied to a sense that no woman is immune to its effects”. Amid the backlash against feminism, over the ravages of the climate crisis, women despair and grieve.
What feminism could possibly be adequate for all of this? Walter’s prescriptions are packaged in chapters with cloying one-word titles that evoke the very empowerment programmes she disparages: “Dare”, “Root”, “Care”, “Regenerate”, “Connect”. She takes us to Rojava in northeast Syria, a Kurdish autonomous region in which institutions have been run jointly by men and women, where women famously fought against Isis, and where feminism is rooted in local tradition. She encourages us to acknowledge the fundamental importance of care, to focus on “mutual co-operation, if we are not to pull apart from one another, completely and brutally”. She urges feminists to “put the environment right at the heart of their revolution”. Perhaps most crucially, she also says women must learn to work with people they might disagree with, however viscerally.
All of this sounds sensible. Whether it would be enough to address what Walter describes elsewhere in the book is another matter.
The book’s scope is both its strength and its downfall. Walter attempts a truly global feminism. Seeing together all these examples of uprising and revolution, of backlash and repression, is occasionally dizzying and often invigorating. But her central argument, that the ecological struggle is inseparable from the feminist one because the climate crisis is unignorable, ultimately amounts to correlation, even if the impacts of that crisis disproportionately affect women in a sexist and unjust world.
I wanted to fall in love with Feminism for a World on Fire, to find in it something that has been missing for me: a true rendering of a world in which the freedom and equality that seemed my birthright have not exactly materialised. This book is readable, enjoyable even, despite the subject matter, but my experience was not of having encountered the text that would spark a movement. I wasn’t reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, or something by Andrea Dworkin. Instead, here is the very template of a contemporary and highly marketable kind of nonfiction: memoir; a little reportage; statistics from a thinktank report; a peppering of cultural and historical reference.
Our problem remains, perhaps, one of imagination. In the depressing reality Walter outlines so well, do feminists, or people more generally, have the capacity to truly imagine something different? Riffing on Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism”, in 2017 Helen Hester wrote about “domestic realism”—that is, “of the stubbornness or obstinacy of domestic imaginaries, even in the face of otherwise extensive visions of socio-technical overhaul”. Even someone like Walter, thinking deeply about feminism over many decades, might be similarly trapped: almost seeing the outline of a new world, but not yet fully grasping its possibilities.
